Our feature profiles Patrick Lahey, president of South Florida company Triton Submarines, as he and his salty crew race billionaire businessman Sir Richard Branson and $600 million Hollywood director James Cameron to the bone-crushing depths of the Mariana Trench.

Video of Triton's mind-boggling subs in action below.

In November, we were the first journalists to get a look at Triton's 3300/3 submarine, which is similar to the spherical hull craft that will make the dive 36,000 feet down in the Pacific to the Mariana Trench. Triton was testing the sub in shallow waters at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute in Vero Beach.

Here's video from Lahey's second series of test dives in the Bahamas a few weeks later:

Michael E. Miller was the senior writer at the Miami New Times. For five years, he covered everything Florida could throw at him. He got an innocent man off of murder charges and got a bad cop suspended from duty. He flew in homemade airplanes, dove into the Atlantic in a tiny submarine, and skateboarded a marathon. He smoked stogies, interviewed strippers, and narrowly survived a cavity search in a Panamanian jungle prison — all in the name of journalism. His only regret is that one time he outed Colombian drug lords for sneaking strippers into Miami jail. For that, he says lo siento. He was only doing his job. Miller’s work for New Times won many national awards including back-to-back Sigma Delta Chi medallions. He has also written for the New York Times, Newsweek, The Atlantic, Chicago Magazine, Village Voice, the New York Daily News, and VQR. He now covers foreign affairs for the Washington Post.